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When you’re just getting started with cold emailing, the simplest mistakes can have the biggest impact.
Including images in your email might seem like a way to make it visually appealing, but it increases the likelihood of landing in the spam folder.
Spam filters are designed to detect anything that looks overly promotional or automated, and emails with embedded images, buttons, or colorful formatting often raise red flags.
Another common pitfall is the use of “spam trigger words”.
There are 5 categories
Don’t forget your goal is to sound like a human, not a newsletter.
If your email domain is new, you need to build some activity to earn the trust of other email servers. A new email domain that suddenly sends a lot of emails is suspicious!
There are two possible approaches:
How to do so with MailReach for example?
That’s it, MailReach automates the heavy lifting, so you get a rock‑solid sender reputation and higher deliverability from day 1.
The subject line is your first impression, and it determines whether your email gets opened or ignored.
Your goal is to create just enough curiosity to earn that click, without sounding gimmicky or aggressive.
Avoid excessive punctuation, full caps, or overused sales terms. Instead, use short, natural language that sounds like it came from a colleague.
Subject lines like “Quick question about your outbound strategy” or “Idea for increasing reply rates” perform far better than “Get 50% more leads today!”
Focus on relevance and tone rather than hype.
The structure of your cold email plays a critical role in how it’s perceived and whether it’s read at all.
Visual layout isn’t just a design concern, it’s a readability and performance lever. In cold outreach, your audience is busy, distracted, and scanning. Your job is to make the message easy to consume at a glance. The less visual friction, the higher your chances of getting a reply.
Avoid blocks of text:
Emails should breathe. Use short lines, one idea per sentence, and space between blocks. This creates rhythm and encourages scrolling.
A simple and effective flow looks like this:
one short opening line to hook the reader,
a second paragraph that introduces context or the problem,
a final line that offers value or asks a question.
The whole message should fit on a single screen, ideally 5 to 7 lines in total.
Keep your lines short:
Not only in sentence count but also in character length. On mobile, long sentences that wrap into multiple lines feel dense and hard to scan. Aim for under 50–60 characters per line.
This also creates visual asymmetry, which draws the eye downward naturally, line by line.
Formatting matters:
Always left-align your message. Centered text feels unnatural in a business context and interrupts eye flow.
Avoid fancy formatting, too much bullet points, bold, or italics. They may look helpful, but they often trigger spam filters or feel like marketing copy.
Plain text with intentional line breaks feels human, natural, and personal.
Make your CTA stand out:
Don’t bury it in a paragraph. Give it a line of its own.
Instead of:
“Would it make sense to explore this further if you’re open?”
Write:
“Would it make sense to explore this?”
This gives the CTA visual weight and makes it easier to respond.
Test on mobile:
Over half of cold emails are opened on smartphones. If your email looks like a wall of text or wraps awkwardly, you’ll lose the reader instantly.
Clean structure isn’t about design, it’s about respect.
When your email feels light, fluid, and skimmable, you show consideration for the reader’s time. And that alone already sets you apart from most of the noise.
The preview text, or preheader, is the small line that appears after the subject line in most inboxes.
It’s a continuation of your hook, not a space to repeat your opening line. Use it to give context, reinforce the value of the message, or introduce a soft CTA.
For example, if your subject is “Scaling your outbound,” a preview like “Thought you might like this quick idea for your team” is more inviting than repeating “Scaling your outbound” again.
Here are a few rules and questions to keep in mind :
You must try to create a strong connection right from the start :
This space is precious, use it to complete the story the subject line started.
Spin syntax is a powerful tool to personalize emails at scale while avoiding content duplication.
It allows you to write multiple versions of a message by rotating words or phrases dynamically.
For example, instead of writing
“Hi John, I saw your team is hiring”
You could write
“{Hi|Hello|Hey} {John|there}, I {noticed|saw|came across the fact that} your team is {hiring|expanding|growing}.”
With this structure, the email tool generates a unique variation for each recipient, reducing spam filter detection and making your outreach feel more personal.
Used well, spin syntax can significantly boost open and reply rates, especially when paired with good targeting and clean data.
That’s it, let’s move on to the next chapter : How to set up your email domain correctly?
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